iNoob
So I bought a Macbook over the weekend.
As a complete Mac noob, I was wondering if any of you wonderful iPeople could recommend me your favourite apps, blogs, websites, tips and tricks.
Charz!
[ Entry posted at: Mon 30 Jun 2008 17:03:08 BST | 6 comment(s)... | Cat: Geeky ]
Tobeon writes:
Textmate
http://macromates.com/
Absolutely worth paying for, brilliant text editor I love it oh so much ^_^
[ Mon 30 Jun 2008 19:11:38 BST ]
Grant writes:
Handbrake for ripping DVDs
Transmission for Torrents
TextMate for coding
Adium for instant messaging
:D Welcome to the world of Mac!
[ Mon 30 Jun 2008 20:33:35 BST ]
Dave writes:
Welcome to the club :D
The recommendations from those guys are absolutely spot on.
To the list I shall add:
Quicksilver: http://www.blacktree.com/ - It's more than just an app launcher; it lets you perform so many actions with so little effort it's almost indistinguishable from telepathy ;) Free.
CoverSutra: http://coversutra.com/ - A neat app that puts your iTunes artwork on your desktop as well as let you search and pick what to listen to in a snap. Also scrobbles your tracks. Not free, nor expensive.
Fluid: http://fluidapp.com/ - If you use a lot of web apps like Gmail, Google Reader, etc., this app pulls them out of your browser and makes them standalone apps. free.
Skitch: http://skitch.com/ - The quickest and simplest way to get an image or screenshot online and annotated, period. It's insanely useful. free.
VLC: http://videolan.org/ - For playing back media that Quicktime doesn't want to. Free.
VMWare Fusion: http://vmware.com/ - If you want to run Windows at the same time as OS X, virtualisation is the way to go. VMWare (my preference, it caused less crashes than Parallels) and Parallels are the big boys in this arena, and they're about equal in features and performance. Try em both, and buy whichever is cheapest.
Flip4Mac: http://is.gd/Juj - A Microsoft-provided plugin to get Windows Media to playback in Quicktime and hence Safari, Firefox, etc. free.
I found it a little bit of a shock to pay for software when I switched from Linux, but you really do get what you pay for and the level of polish and thought that Cocoa devs put into the user experience really shows on the Mac. Go forth, and support indie developers!
[ Tue 01 Jul 2008 12:06:56 BST ]
Chris writes:
Quicksilver from http://www.blacktree.com/ is an absolute must. Takes a bit of getting used to, but its well worth the learning curve.
Textmate is nice, not sure its worth paying for though. Depends how well you get on with vim i suppose.
Adium is what all IM clients should be like.
Fink for those moments when you want apt-get for your mac.
Oh and when you want a #.. its on alt 3
[ Tue 01 Jul 2008 12:38:45 BST ]
Elmo writes:
I would add:
DivX (Just cos you wanna play all those DivX files :))
Disk InventoryX
The Gimp, as its probably the best Image tool thats free :)
The Unarchiver is rather usefull for uncompressing lots of files
Text Wrangler is my text editor of choice (And its free)
Max is a rather good CD ripper :)
[ Tue 01 Jul 2008 14:49:33 BST ]
Frosty writes:
Congratumalations! :-D
All of the above are great recommendations - in particular, I use TextMate, Quicksilver, Adium and Skitch all the damn time. It's certainly worth spending some time getting to know Quicksilver past just the simple-app-launching stage - it's really, really powerful. I may blog a guide to some handy things I do with it, sometime soon.
Another media thing you might want to install is Perian [http://www.perian.org] - it adds support for tonnes of video/audio formats to Quicktime. Lovely stuff.
Of course, the included iLife apps (iPhoto, iTunes, iMovie, Garageband, iWeb) are great. And I think if you're going to be doing presentations, iWork is well worth getting for the awesomeness that is Keynote. Nothing compares :-)
If you want to convert videos, check out VisualHub [http://www.techspansion.com/visualhub/] (or FFMpegX [http://homepage.mac.com/major4/] if you want a free-but-clunky alternative), and iSquint [http://www.isquint.org/] (free, but only for going to iPod format). If you want to download torrents, you can't go wrong with Transmission (it's free).
Finally, as far as web browsers go, I'm a Safari boy, mainly for its speed and clean-ness. Also, WebKit (its HTML-rendering engine) seems to be far superior to Gecko, etc). That said, Firefox's speed seems to be much-improved in Firefox 3.
Hope this helps!
[ Tue 01 Jul 2008 15:19:37 BST ]